Canned beans are great because they’re still very inexpensive and can go from unopened can to table in 5 minutes or less.  In my pantry I usually keep plain black and white beans, refried pinto and or black beans and some flavored varieties, like Cuban-style black beans.  One of my favorite things to do with canned beans is to use them as a base for a leftover stew.  Below is a particularly tasty mix I created for a weekend dinner when I didn’t feel like cooking.  This made just one serving.

Brazillian-style black bean and left over stew

• 1/4 lb of left over low fat turkey polish sausage, cut in moon-shaped slices
• 3 large cooked shrimp, cut in half
• 1/4 medium onion
• 1t olive oil
• 1 roma tomato, chopped and drained
• 1/2 can Trader Joes Cuban-style black beans (black beans with onion and peppers)
• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
• 2T parsley, chopped

Fry sausage and onion in olive oil until it is browned.  Add tomato and cook for another 5 min.  Add the black beans and heat through until simmering.  Add the shrimp and parsley to your bowl.  Add the garlic to the beans and cook another 2 minutes.  Add the bean stew to your bowl and mix well.

This recipe is based *VERY* loosely on the Brazillian feijoada stew that has all sorts of meat, sausage and black beans.  If you like the combination of meat and beans, you should definitely look up a recipe for feijoada and give it a try.  I’m sure I’ll post a recipe here soon since it’s one of my favorites.

This formula could work for lots of different left over meats and vegetables.  Take your left overs and add enough beans to make a nice stew and heat it through.  It could be as simple as that.  I like to caramelize some of the meat and vegetables first for added flavor.  I also like to add fresh garlic, onion and herbs to enhance the flavor.  Be creative!

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To thicken soup using beans, remove a small portion of cooked beans from the soup (or from a new can of beans) and just enough liquid to blend it smooth in a blender or food processor. Add smooth beans back to the soup. Repeat until the soup is the desired thickness.

Besides beans, I have also used cauliflower to thicken a soup. There are so many ways to thicken soups that I wrote a full post on all the different ways to thicken a soup.

I came up with the idea to thicken soup using beans while I was making a recipe of pork chops and pan sauce.  I sometimes make a vegetable ragout using white beans and the sauce never needs any additional thickening.  The beans add a luscious thickness that makes the sauce come together perfectly.  For the pork chop recipe I didn’t want any beans in the sauce. But I still wanted the same silky texture as the ragout.  I always keep cans of refried beans around so figured that might work.

Refried beans to thicken soup!

Refried beans do have some whole beans in them so I smashed them with a spoon until they were nearly completely smooth.  A few tablespoons of beans added into the sauce rewarded me. I got exactly what I was looking for- a rich, creamy sauce without adding fat or starch.  I did need to cook the sauce a few minutes for the beans to fully incorporate into the sauce.

In addition to adding a silky texture to a sauce or stew, beans add welcome fiber that is lacking in nearly everyone’s diet.  Fiber helps keep your insides moving and reduces cholesterol.  Some people complain of gas caused by beans, but that only happens with people that don’t get enough fiber already.  If you eat beans regularly, the gas problems will go away and you’ll have a very well-functioning gastrointestinal tract.

As I type this, it occurred to me that I can grind dry beans as an instant thickener similar to Wondra flour.  I’ll definitely try this in the future and post about the experience.

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I sometimes watch this crazy show on BBC America called You are what you eat.  If you haven’t seen it before, it’s a British reality show centered around a natural nutritionist named Gillian McKeith.  She busts in on a fat person or family, chastizes them for their bad eating habits and then puts them on an insanely strict diet for 8 weeks.  It’s an entertaining show on many levels.  I’m actually watching it right now as I type this.

One of the items on this strict diet is aduki beans, also called azuki or adzuki beans.  These are the same beans that Chinese and Japanese cooks turn into red bean paste filling for pastries and other desserts.  Gillian claims these beans have some super healthy benefits but is never too clear about what they are.  Well, I just had make an aduki bean stew to see what all the fuss was about.  Of course, the other ingredients in this were what happened to be aging in my fridge.

Aduki bean stew

• 2 strips of bacon, chopped (see below for the vegetarian version)
• 3 stalks of celery, chopped
• 3 carrots, chopped
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 8 mushrooms
• 1t thyme
• 1 bay leaf
• 3 cups of chicken stock
• 1 can of aduki beans, including the liquid
• salt and pepper to taste

Fry the bacon until crisp.  Leave the bacon in the pan but drain out some of the excess fat and save it for something else.  Add the celery, carrots and onions and cook for 10 min until starting to soften.  Add the mushrooms and cook another 5 min.  Add the thyme, bay leaf, chicken stock and aduki beans and simmer covered for 20min until thickened slightly.  Take off the lid and cook until it is at the desired thickness. Then add salt and pepper to taste.

Let me start by saying that this tasted a LOT better than I thought it would.  I would definitely make this again.  You could substitute any beans and vary the vegetables.  Root vegetables like potatoes, turnips or rutabegas would be delicious in this.  Even sweet potatoes would be great in this.  For a vegan version, substitute olive oil for the bacon and add brown rice or quinoa to make a complete protein.  Going the other way, you could add some boneless country style ribs or chuck to turn this into a meaty stew.  Fresh parsley would have been a nice addition at the end.  Dang!  I keep forgetting to pick that up when I’m shopping!

If you make this recipe or a variation of it, post a comment to tell us about it.

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I called this a “ragout” because I used thyme, which I typically think of as a French spice.  You can just call it a stew if you like.  I love the way the beans thicken the sauce up without having to add any additional starch.  The final texture of the sauce is much finer and silkier than most stews.

Chicken and white bean ragout (stew)

• 3 chicken thighs
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 stalks of celery, chopped
• 2 cups mushrooms, sliced
• 1 can of pinto beans, drained
• 1/2t dried thyme
• 1 bay leaf
• 1T kitchen bouquet
• 2 cups chicken stock
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1T olive oil

Fry the chicken thighs in a stainless pan over medium heat with the olive oil.  It’s important to get the chicken well browned with the bits stuck in the pan getting well browned as well.  Watch the heat so that the bits in the pan don’t burn.  You only need to get a nice brown color right now.  The chicken will cook fully with the other ingredients later.

Remove the chicken and add the carrots, celery and onions and cook about 5-10 min until they start to soften.  Add the mushrooms and cook another 5 min.  Add the beans, thyme, kitchen bouquet and chicken stock.   Turn the pan down to low.  Add the chicken thighs back to the pan, cover and simmer about 15 min.

Remove the lid and check the consistency.  It should be thick like a stew.  If it’s too dry, add some water.  If it’s too saucy, turn up the heat and cook with the lid off until it thickens up.  Spoon some sauce into a shallow bowl and top with a chicken thigh.

Here are some minor variations that I think would be nice.

• Use fresh thyme and/or rosemary
• Mix in some fresh chopped parsley just before serving
• Use chicken breasts but fry them fully and add at the end
• Use great northern beans instead of pinto

Here are some more major renovations!

• Substitute bell pepper for the carrots to give it a Cajun spin.  Leave out the mushrooms and add hot sauce and/or cayenne to complete the theme.  Heck, swap alligator tail for the chicken!
• Swap chickpeas for the beans and change the spices to cinnamon, allspice, ginger and cumin.  Add chopped apricots and/or preserved lemons.  Serve with a couscous pilaf.

Remember that any ingredient in any recipe can potentially be substituted or omitted.  Use your creativity!  If you make this or any variation, post a comment to let me know.  I’d love to hear how you made this recipe your own!

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This is the same idea that Tyler Florence uses on his show “Tyler’s Ultimate“.  On this show, Tyler starts with a single dish he wants to perfect.  Next he watches several people make variations on that dish to give him ideas and inspiration.  He then takes the best ideas and puts them together into his “ultimate” recipe.  I love this idea and do the same thing for almost everything I make.

If I already know the dish I want to make (let’s say, “cassoulet”), I start by searching Google for recipes.  Google is the best place to search for recipes because it favors web pages that people link to.  The better the recipe, the more links, the higher the ranking in Google.

I then start reading the recipes get an idea of what typically makes up the dish.   I see what ingredients are common or unique.  Common ingredients are probably must-haves, the unique ones could be optional.  I then think about substitute ingredients and what I might have on hand.  I ask myself:

• How do I make this something my family and I will love?
• How do I make this healthy?
• How do I make this in a way that won’t take me hours in the kitchen?
• How do I make this using ingredients I already have?
• How do I make this using inexpensive ingredients?

I now build my perfect recipe.  As an example, here is what happened when I decided to make cassoulet:

I Googled cassoulet recipe and came up with this:

I read all three recipes and realized right away that I definitely needed white beans, pork, tomato, garlic, onion, and bay leaves.  Mmmm… sounds good so far.  From the remaining ingredients I decided to include bacon, carrots, celery, parsley, and thyme since we love all those.  Duck confit was used often but it’s pretty expensive and I never have that on hand so left it out.  My wife isn’t a huge sausage fan so I used boneless pork country style ribs instead.  I had some plain white button mushrooms that needed to be used so in they went.  The cooking technique was pretty much the same in all the recipes so I just followed one of them with my new list of ingredients.  I’ll list the full recipe out in another post.

The resulting cassoulet was, as I expected, the best I ever had!

If you find this useful and make your own perfect recipe, post it in the comments so we can use it to build our own perfect recipe.

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Mexican moms have been cutting up leftover tortillas to make chips and chilaquiles for millions of years.  Well maybe not millions, but a long time.   They do it partially to be frugal but also those left over tortillas make the BEST tasting chips.  Below is a description of how I turned some really awful tortillas into some tasty chips to go with bean dip.

Before I get to the recipe, the point I really wanted to make here is that you can often turn bad things into good things with a little creativity.  Stale bread makes great croutons, french toast and bread pudding.  Leftover meat can be chopped for tacos or sliced for sandwiches.  Just be creative- but don’t go too far.  Any way you “slice” it, rotten meat is rotten meat.

Ok, now on to the recipe…

I had these Brown Rice tortillas from Trader Joes that were bad- and I mean really bad.  I ate a few but neglected them in the fridge for a week and a half because I couldn’t bear the thought of another crumbly wrap.

I cut them up with scissors into strips and then put them on a foil-lined baking sheet.

A little nonstick spray and 10 minutes at 350F turned them into really tasty chips.

They really did rival store-bought tortilla chips but with much less fat and I didn’t waste the tortillas.  I celebrated by making a bean dip to go along:

Spicy Garlic and Chipotle Bean Dip

I love canned chipotles in adobo.  They keep in the panty forever, are cheap and a tiny bit goes a long way.  Oh yeah- they taste AWESOME!  How’s that for a frugal ingredient!  I love to pair chipotles with garlic like I did in this bean dip.  I also love chipotles, garlic and mayo as a dip for steamed artichokes.

• 1 can of refried beans.  Look for low or no fat varieties.
• 1 or 2 chipotles in adobo.  A can usually has at least 8-10.  They’re HOT so go easy!
• 1 clove of garlic, chopped finely
• 2T oil
• Salt and pepper

That’s all there is.  Just blend it all up so the chipotles mostly disappear and then microwave until it’s hot.  You WILL make this again.

Let me know if you found a creative use for something that was going bad!

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